“Visualizations,” Ware writes, “have a small but crucial and expanding role in cognitive systems. Visual displays provide the highest bandwidth channel from the computer to the human. We acquire more information through vision than all of the other senses combined. The 20 billion or so neurons of the brain devoted to analyzing visual information provide a pattern-finding mechanism that is a fundamental component in much of our cognitive activity.”

That’s an academic way of stating a fact that many project managers have leveraged for years: Getting folks to understand complex concepts is hard, and pictures make it easier.

I get asked a lot about how to display variance in OnePager. This post will hopefully get your creative juices flowing about how to meet your specific needs. You might be interested in a project summary chart that looks something like this:

Have you ever wondered what this button does? The Crop button is used to hide empty rows in OnePager. Knowing about cropping (aka “hiding”) will allow you to be a more efficient user of OnePager, and also avoid confusion if you use snapshots.Continue reading →